As I wrote last week, I knew that it wouldn’t be the end of it when Vadel insisted, “Let me check on you every morning, drive you to appointments, do your grocery shopping, take care of your yard, take out your trash and clean your house.”
When he came to visit I was surprised to see that he had grown a bristly beard when he had always been clean shaven before. However, I wasn’t surprised when he started in again about looking after us old codgers.
Several years ago I took him to Knightstown to meet Eric and Jeff, the publishers of the Knightstown Banner. Afterwards, we visited my seventy-something sister, Christine Jones. While we drove back to Indy, Vadel went into a diatribe: “Rose,” he thundered. I cannot believe how your sister’s family treat her! Where are her children? Where are her little grandchildren? They should be with her.”
I tried to explain to him that one of Christine’s daughters lived with her and that her seven other children cared about her, but had their own homes and jobs in other towns to tend to. After I got home, I called Christine who laughed merrily. “Good grief! I wouldn’t want a bunch of my children and grandchildren here all the time. It’d drive me nuts! I’m glad to see the little kiddies come, and I’m glad to see ‘em go. After they leave I have to lean back in my recliner and take a nap.”
During this recent visit, Vadel said, “I disapprove of your daughter.” For goodness’ sake, why?” “She should be here with you and Mister Bill.” “Vadel, she lives only an hour and a half away. All we have to do is call if we need her, and she comes. She was here for six weeks after Bill’s bypass surgery and for two weeks when I was ill in December. Her husband works in Chicago, but came on weekends.” I tried to explain that Bill and I treasure our independence. When I told Vicki what he had said she responded, “It shows how different our cultures are.”
I tried to explain that our history is different from that of his land. “America began as a nation of pioneers where people sometimes moved great distances from their families in order to own land. These days, people often move to other places because of jobs.” He said, “I’m not buying that. She should be here!”
For a few years, Vadel bounced back and forth between here and Mauritania. After he married, I asked him when he would bring his wife here. “She will remain with my mother as long as my mother is alive.” I suspect that few American women would agree to that arrangement.
During our recent visit, he said, “I devoted myself to my mother’s care during her last months. I slept in a room that adjoined hers with the door open so that I would hear her.” What a contrast to many of the establishments where America’s elderly end up that a playwright called “waiting rooms for death.”
Vadel told me that every Mauritanian who bears his last name is a relative, and that if one of them shows up at his door, he is bound to take him in. I thought about my mother’s Kelly ancestors who came here by oxcart, cleared the forest and plowed the fields of their beloved Old Home Place in Clinton Co. shortly after Indiana became a state.
For many years the family lived a short distance away. When I was young my mother knew where all of her cousins were and kept in touch. I saw several of them once a year when Uncle Nolan Kelly, Aunt June, Grandpa, Mother and I went for Sunday dinner at the Michigantown home of Grandpa’s sister, Laura.
And now? Sadly, I don’t know what became of any of them or their children. wclarke@comcast.net